My new
iMac 24" arrived this week. Unfortunately, I didn't have much time in setting it up (business and social obligations), so I had to wait a bit... Very annoying. Anyway, in the mean time it's up and running, and man.... it is fast.
I ordered the basic 24" version (2.4Ghz, 1GB RAM, 320GB HD) with the wired UK keyboard. On it's arrival I immediately bought 2 * 2GB RAM to upgrade the memory to 4GB. I bought it later (and not from Apple) because of the big price difference. The iMac with 4GB pre-configured was hundreds of euros more expensive, and 2 Kingston DDR2 667 (PC2-5300) SODIMM were around 80 euros a piece. That saved me some money. Money I can use to buy me a larger FW800 or NAS unit for backup.
Hooking up the iMac was easy (as you expect from Apple). Downside was that Leopard wasn't installed, so I had to install it myself (original Leopard DVD was included in the package). In the mean time I could setup the other devices around my iMac (audio, 12km of cables, and my
24" Dell TFT). After Leopard was installed I had two 24" displays on my desk.... SWEET :-P .
There is one small problem with the two displays... They don't align (vertically) very well, so I have to raise the Dell 24" about an inch with something :-( .
The purchase of the iMac would also be my first experience with the
new aluminum keyboard and the
Apple Mighty mouse. I choose the wired keyboard, because I can't be bothered with replacing the batteries. They always die on a Sunday evening when there's no way on getting new batteries in time.
The experience with the mouse was kinda disapointing. It just didn't feel right (I tried it for a couple of hours). So I replaced it for my old Logitech MX510. The keyboard however is awesome. It's small, but with all the features you expect from Apple. The keyboard requires a little getting used to (about 5 minutes).
The next thing is migrating data from my old Windows PC to the iMac, and figuring out
Boot Camp. This still allows me to install Windows XP and run some games or Windows specific software on the iMac hardware.
Since the upgrade to OSX Leopard, I've not been able to use PGP, since it simple won't work. Yesterday I received an e-mail that the
public beta of PGP 9.7 has been released (for Windows and OSX). This one does work on Leopard (until December this year though), so I guess that I need to BUY myself yet another version of PGP.
I found one 'bug' in the meantime; I seem to be missing the encrypt and sign buttons in the OSX Mail app. Or I might be missing something? I don't want to use the PGP service which signs or encrypts everything. I want to sign and/or encrypt when I want to, and not when an app tells me to.
The Holland Oyama Cup was held on November 4th in Zevenbergen. I made a Quick-and-Dirty gallery of the event which can be found
here. I also placed some Black&White versions on Flickr.
Enjoy
I do have a (small) wish list for my hobby. The list (in a random order) consists mostly of high quality glass, and the combined total is a small 5000 euro (yikes!!)..... Anyone got some change to spare?
- Nikon AF-D 85mm F/1.8
- Nikon AF-D 35mm F/2.0
- Nikon AF-S 70-200mm F/2.8 VR ED Black
Nikon AF-S 28-70mm F/2.8 ED Black- Nikon AF-G 10.5mm F/2.8 G ED DX
Now where did I leave my lotterytickets???
UPDATE: w00t, I actually won..... 10 euro's :(
A couple of weeks ago, my Windows PC was starting to crash. Hard disks were going; 'plonk, plonk, rrrrrrr, tac tac, rrrrr '. Most of the times this resulted in system freezes or blue screens. So ever since that weekend, I've been looking into an iMac 24".
Last weekend I ordered my iMac in the online Apple Store. It's the standard 24" with 320GB drive and 1GB of RAM. My current PC also has only 320GB of diskspace, and I'm not even close on filling that up. I will upgrade the 1GB of RAM myself. If I buy the memory at my 'local' computershop it saves me around 600 euro's on 4GB. The Apple prices for memory are just ridiculous.
Another point of frustration is the keyboard layout. Every PC sold in the Netherlands (wel, almost every PC) has a English-US keyboard. Why isn't that layout available as an option. I hate the vertical 'enter', and the small 'left-shift' on the NL, and UK keyboards. Too bad, that you can't order an iMac without keyboard and mouse. So, anyone interested in a new (thin aluminum) Apple keyboard and MightyMouse (both on a wire).
This only leaves me with my Windows server at the moment. It would be nice to replace that one with a Mac Mini.
The default background image on OSX Leopard is this annoying Aurora/starfield kinda picture. To change this, just change the desktop background image by using the rightmouse button on the desktop.It's something different to change the background image on the login screen. Some searching revealed that it uses the DefaultDesktop.jpg in the
/System/Library/CoreServices/ directory. 'Just' replace that file with your own picture. There is a small catch. If you replace it, it will get the wrong permissions on the file, and therefor won't show up on the login screen.Just 'reset' the permissions on the file like this:
- sudo chown root /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg
- sudo chmod 755 /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg
You may need to enter a username and password while executing these commands.
I totally forgot to mention that we had another photo fieldtrip last week. This time we went to the Flevopolder (
Flevo-Landschap &
Oostvaardersplassen). We had good fun, cold weather, and some
interesting pictures.
As usual, you can see an extract of them on
my Flickr page.
Every once in a lifetime, a virus/trojan or wahtever for Mac OSX raises it's 'ugly' head. And now we got a
Trojan. Infection occurs through porn websites :-P, and it promises a codec with which you can view the x-rated content on the website(s). I guess that there's a sex-starved market out there.
As you might have guesed, the trojan isn't exactly what it promises to be. It modifies your DNS settings, which are almost undetectable (for regular users). The result is that you might get rerouted to other sites than you originally intended. Since 'they' control the DNS, you might be typing your usernames and passwords for eBay on a site that's not really eBay.
There are way of
detecting and removig the darn thing.
The new Finder in Leopard has this neat feature that shows your documents (and other stuff) that have been accessed '
Yesterday', '
Today', and '
Past Week'. Very handy. Downside is that it shows not only the documents, but also every other file that has been changed. So a nice short list of documents is out of the question. After a day of workin, you might end up with a very, very long list of files.
The '
Search For' is a nice way of exploring the crap on your machine after an upgrade of Tiger. Do an upgrade and use the '
Search For' feature the next day. I found some files that I didn't even knew I had. Most of them were mail related (kinda embarrassing attachments etc.).
Oh, and if you're a person that wants to hide certain things on the computer, you might wanna disable spotlight (or whatever function is doing this), because it's one hell of a Parental Control mechanism. Even the items you used in the preference panel show up.
B.t.w. Did I mention that the new Cover Flow feature in Finder just kicks ass. It runs as smooth as a
baby's bottom... well you get the idea.
It's been a long night, but I finally installed Leopard. The reason it took so long is that I didn't have a retail DVD of the the OS. I had to screw around with a diskimage. From the moment I successfully burned the DVD it took about half an hour to 40 minutes to upgrade Tiger to Leopard.
Here are my experiences:
- First time booting into the desktop takes forever. I guess that spotlight is to blame for this, but I'm not sure.
- Eventhough I had correctly configured network interfaces, the network assistant thingy popped up, and kept bothering me (even after reboots).
Removing it from the 'login items' stopped it.
- My Mail (all account were configured as IMAP) was unable to retrieve new e-mails from all accounts. After some poking around I deleted all accounts and mail settings. After recreating the accounts everything worked fine. This is the nice thing about IMAP. You can remove your account and settings, and you won't lose your mail, because it remains on the server.
- Adobe Lightroom seems to work, and so do all of my other image manipulation tools.
- PGP v9.6.x crashes. I had to remove it by hand. Too bad that there isn't a documented manual uninstall procedure. Guess I have to wait for an update. Just uninstall the app before upgrading.
Initial impressions:
- Faster than Tiger
- Very backwards compatible. Vista eat you heart out.
- The app improvements on Finder, and the Dock are great. Especially the coverflow view in Finder kicks ass, and runs great on my 'old' MacBook Pro.
- .....
